Scott Sullivan wrote:

> I was speaking with Vietnamese gentalman the other day. He
> was telling me
> about the history (in brief) of the Vietnamese witten
> language. He said that
> the language was romanized by a Frenchman in the 1600 and that the
> Vietnamese, prior to that used a character system similar to
> Chinese. I was
> wondering if anyone had any knowledge of this or, especially,
> any examples.

The script was called Chu' Nôm, and it was a very free adaptation of the
Chinese script. Some characters were used for their meaning and some others
for their sound. Also, many new characters were invented following the
example of existing ones.

See here for more info and samples:
http://www.omniglot.com/writing/chunom.htm

_ Marco